Renowned Professor of Psychiatry and present direct of Safe Harbor in Pennsylvania submits expert testimony to Rep. Josh Green, M.D. regarding his lengthy history of publications in this realm, including double blind studies, which is what industry apparatchiks and lobbyists always seem to ask for and by parroting eachother and saying is missing in their efforts to devalue all consumer protection legislation.

::::::::

Dear Dr. Green, Representative, Chairman Hawaii House Health Committee and members of the Committee

I understand that as part of your deliberation regarding the possibility of banning aspartame use in Hawaii you wish to hear from professionals who have done research on this issue.

My first publication on adverse reactions to this artificial sweetener was a case report: Walton, R.G. Seizure and Mania after High Intake of Aspartame Psychosomatics March 1986 27(3) 218-220. I concluded that my patient's clinical course could best be accounted for by her aspartame intake. One of the reviewers for this paper was Dr. Richard Wurtman, Chairman of the Department of Cognitive Sciences at M.I.T. Dr. Wurtman contacted me and asked me to keep track of other patients with seizures which I felt could be related to aspartame consumption. I did so and was eventually invited by Dr. Wurtman to present a paper at an M.I.T. conference - "Dietary Phenylalanine and Brain Function" held May 8-10, 1987. That paper forms the basis of a chapter in a book edited by Dr.Wurtman: Walton, R.G. Chapter 18 The Possible Role of Aspartame in Seizure Induction; WurtmanR.J., Ritter-Walker,E. Dietary Phenylalanine and Brain Function. Boston Birkhauser 1988.

Although at that time I felt aspartame was a "possible" trigger my subsequent clinical experience over the past 20 years has, in my mind transformed that "possibility" into a certainty.

In both of my original papers I suggested that appropriate double blind studies needed to be done. I undertook such a study, which was published in Biological Psychiatry in 1993: Walton, R.G. Hudak,R.Grrene-Waite, R. Adverse Reactions to Aspartame:Double Blind Challenge in Patients from a Vulnerable Population. Biological Psychiatry, 1993;34:13-17. My hypothesis in this study was that since aspartame led to an increase in norepinephrine precursors, coupled with a simultaneous decrease in serotonin precursors, the potential alteration in central nervous system catecholamine/indoleamine balance would pose a special challenge for patients with a mood disorder.

I was not prepared for the severity of adverse reactions, which led the I.R.B. to appropriately put an early end to the study. Despite the resultant small "n" the findings were still statistically significant, demonstrating that patients with affective disorder were particularly vulnerable to a wide range of adverse reactions.
One unexpected event was that 2 study participants experienced opthalmologic emergencies - one, a 42 year old psychologist with no history of eye problems experienced a retinal detachment and required emergency surgery and a 40 year old nurse for the first time in her life had a conjunctival hemorrhage.

For statistical purposes these events were recorded as occurring during the placebo arm, but there was concern that these problems may have been initiated during the aspartame arm, which they had both just completed. My own belief is that these problems were related to the methanol produced by their aspartame consumption, although this was of course not one of the conclusions of the study.

There will undoubtedly be a great deal of pressure from the aspartame industry, which will point to the hundreds of studies attesting to their product's safety. It is important to bear in mind, however, that virtually all of these studies were funded by the industry, whereas essentially all independently funded studies identify one or more problems.

I pointed this out to Mike Wallace in 1996 when he was interviewing me for a 60 Minutes segment on aspartame. He challenged me on this so I prepared a chart documenting my claim. This chart was included in the 60 Minutes story and is still available on the internet.

In summary, Dr. Green, after studying and researching this question for over 20 years, it is my firm conviction that aspartame lowers seizure threshold, mimics or exacerbates a wide variety of neuropsychiatric disorders, contributes to the incidence of certain cancers, and because of it's impact on the hypothalamic "appestat" plays a significant role in the world-wide epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

It should definitely be banned.

Thank you for your attention to this most urgent public health issue.

Yours sincerely,

Ralph G. Walton, M.D.
Medical Director, Safe Harbor Behavioral Health
Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine
Former Professor and Chairman,
Department of Psychiatry,
Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine

Submitter: Stephen Fox

Submitters Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Submitters Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev